Wayne O'Leary

Keeping On Keeping On in Iraq

The report of the Iraq Study Group, awaited eagerly for guidance
lo these many months, hit the book shelves in mid-December with a
dispiriting thud; it says, effectively, that we must stay in Iraq.
How long depends on the ever-familiar "situation on the ground." The
report says many other things as well, chief among them being that
the Bush administration has botched this adventure badly and that the
current situation is both grave and deteriorating.

The study group does, by inference, come out against the Bush
objective of military victory; nowhere does that phrase appear. It
also calls for bringing the war to a conclusion and withdrawing at
some point (perhaps starting in 2008), but with the caveats that the
US has a special commitment and obligation to Iraq, that Iraq will
need our assistance for years to come, and that we have long-term
interests at stake in the region and must "stay engaged."

In the last analysis, the study group seems to be seeking a way to
leave Iraq without leaving. It wants to win the support of the
American people for what it calls a "new approach" and a "better way
forward," based on diplomacy and Iraqification of the war. The
president, who has rejected the specifics of the report out of hand,
has nevertheless cleverly seized upon those words to craft a new
slogan he calls "a new way forward." Regardless, his recent surge
pronouncement indicates he remains wedded to the basic
stay-the-course approach outlined at an election campaign appearance
in late October. "We will stay in Iraq, we will fight in Iraq and we
will win in Iraq," he promised then.

The study group report was an obvious affront to the White House,
which against its advice wants to add, not subtract, troops (up to
20,000 or more) and increase the budget for the war by $100 billion;
the Bush team plans to dig the proverbial hole deeper. To the
president, any revision in tactics amounts to admitting past failure
and past mistakes, something George W. Bush is constitutionally
incapable of doing. Yet, to any objective observer, it is apparent
the study group is essentially on Bush's side. It agrees with him
that Iraq is "a centerpiece of American foreign policy" whose role is
"vital" and "critical;" it has no strategic quarrel in hindsight with
the proposition that the US should have gone into Iraq and no quarrel
with the desirability of wielding American influence in that part of
the world.

The neocon crazies and the foot soldiers of the radical right to
the contrary notwithstanding, the Iraq Study Group is not a
collection of peaceniks. These are people who want a bipartisan
consensus that will unite the country behind a smarter, more
efficient path toward winning the latest good war. They may define
winning differently than the president, viewing it more as a
multifaceted diplomatic-political-military exercise that preserves
American credibility and interests (such as oil) and less as a purely
military conquest that leaves us with a permanent physical presence
reminiscent of the Roman Empire. But to reiterate, the study group is
not the intellectual wing of MoveOn.org.

The 10 members of the group are pillars of what now passes for the
Washington establishment. That is, they are predominantly
moderate-to-conservative. On the overthrow of Saddam, they were
largely neutral or supportive. The Republicans among them are all
standard-issue party stalwarts; the Democrats are all Clintonites,
which is to say, they're centrists. In short, the panel charged with
finding a way out of Iraq contains no out-and-out liberals and no
vocal opponents of the war.

The fact that such a center-right collection of individuals has
been as critical of the administration as it has speaks volumes about
the bankruptcy of the Bush Iraq policy. To this extent, the study
group is to be commended for its honesty. That doesn't mean its
recommendations should necessarily be followed to the letter. It has
rejected the one sound strategic alternative advanced for fixing the
problem: devolution of Iraq into three semi-autonomous sectarian
regions.

Instead, it has endorsed a hodge-podge approach, the now-famous 79
recommendations, which together amount to continuing current
occupation activities at a reduced level, while looking for a
graceful way out of what has become an untenable situation. It's a
variation of the Vietnamization strategy of a generation ago in
Southeast Asia: Hang around for a while and hope the locals can get
their act together, politically and militarily. If they do, leave
leisurely in triumph with trumpets blaring; if they don't, slip out
in the dead of night like the Colts leaving Baltimore and hope no one
notices. (Good luck in both instances.)

There is another way, but it involves thinking the unthinkable.
Why not just depart sooner rather than later and cut our losses? The
proposed study-group policy basically throws good money after bad,
and in the end, the result is likely to be the same. Except for a
secularized, cosmopolitan minority in Baghdad, many of whom (an
estimated 1.6 million) have already left the city as expatriates,
Iraqis appear unready for democracy. Perhaps they should be allowed
to fight their civil war, leaving the US and the West to deal with
whoever is left standing. It won't be pretty, and there will be
recriminations all around, starting with a politicized war of words
in this country over establishing blame for a national embarrassment.
Expect a "Who lost Iraq?" debate analogous to the "Who lost China?"
dispute of the late 1940s. That's a price we'll have to pay.

In any event, Iraq is irretrievably lost, even if it was not ours
to lose in the first place. It's a question now of whether we will
drag things out and endure an expensive, humiliating, slow-motion
defeat over several years' time, or tear the scar tissue now and
accept the pain all at once to get it over with and done. The
arrogance and stupidity of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have created the
worst foreign-policy disaster in US history and placed the country in
a classic no-win position. This generation of Americans will have to
accept the results and learn from them as best it can.